The Heart of Ram's Head

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a novel about the evil that lurks inside of all of humanity; when pushed close enough to the breaking points, primal actions emerge in primal situations. Conrad alludes to Nietzche's quote: "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you."

I have found a modern setting for this novel to replace the African Congo: my university's dining hall during finals week.

Every student is on campus; there is no going home during finals. Every student also emerges from their studying cocoons composed of flash cards, crumpled notes, highlighters, and tears at the same time to eat from communal vats of cheap food.

Just as the characters in Heart of Darkness fight for survival in a world with no rules, students fight for an empty table. The idlers stare at their stacks of plates adorned with used napkins and empty glasses with melting ice as they complain to one another about this test and that. Those without tables stalk the lucky few, pacing around and around, stomachs growling and minds imagining the moment they forcefully swipe the dirty dishes from the tables and throw a jacket onto the chair, like the Belgians taking the Congo, claiming the table for their own.

After twenty minutes of stalking the tables and a few minutes before cannibalization seems viable, finally one opens up! One of your pack approaches the table, but a swifter student seizes with a maniacal victory laugh. Death glares ensue as your group returns to pacing in circles in the increasingly frustrated throng.

Eventually, you ecstatically seize a table for your very own with just enough seats to accommodate your numbers. Heading out into the abyss, you seek to win yourself a plate of warm nourishment. But alas! all the stations are out of food and the lines waiting for the disgruntled workers to replenish their stocks extend agonizingly far. From a distance, you spot a pizza about to be removed from its fiery shelf and thrown to the masses for consumption. You elbow your way to the front of the crowd to ensure a good spot to pounce upon the fresh, cheesy goodness.

Ducking and spinning and fighting all the way, you manage to claim a slice for yourself. Still riding the high from your victory, you go for a glass to obtain a drink to augment your recently acquired food. There are none. You seek a fork and knife. There are none.

Frustrated, you stalk back to your table to sit down, prepared to choke down food with your fingers and no liquid accompaniment.

Your chair is gone.

You slam your plate down on the table, causing the grease bubbling in the pizza to splatter into the air. "Where is my chair??" you announce to the patrons eating all around you, silent and ignore your plight.

In your mind, you are ripping the chairs from underneath their smug butts, separating their heads from their bodies and skewering them on sticks around your table to serve as examples for further people who want to steal your chairs. Gathering the chairs from under the decapitated bodies, you stack them up and sit high up in the air, shouting "the horror, the horror!" over the whole scene as people cry in the floor, clutching their plates and murmuring, "I just want a seat...a glass... a fork."

But instead you share a chair with your friend, squashed tightly together as you silently eat and then surrender your table to the next group to set the cycle anew.

As you exit the double doors into the cold world, hardly full and satisfied, you think how when they swiped your card, the dining hall staff also swiped a little piece of your soul. A little of your faith in humanity.

But you have survived. You have stared into the apocalypse and won.

Brevity is Beauty

Usually at a semester's end, I feel nostalgic or at least a little sad that a certain set of experiences, faces, and the overall feeling that things will never be just as they are again. All my life, I've been a self-professed hater of change.

But as the countdown on my dorm room door ticks down to zero and I get closer and closer to home, I don't really feel that ache for each "last" like before. It was very anti-climatic as my professor in my last lecture clicked off his microphone for the very last time. His preceding lecture was oh so relevant to the thoughts already drifting around in my head.

Maybe it's the completely different environment I'm in, or the difficulty of becoming attached to a two hundred person lecture, or a sign of growing into adulthood.

Or maybe it's what my professor was talking about today before he sent us off into the world, having departed a semester's worth of wisdom onto half-comprehending vessels with notebooks and Macbooks. The lecture was about human values--it is natural to think we value what is permanent. Immortality is appealing and death is terrifying. We want to choose the longer lasting everything. Antiques are more valuable than new furniture; older friends are better friends.

My professor challenged this assertion. We also value what is rare, scarce, and unique. What is more scarce than time? It is the ultimate example of something important in limited numbers. And things that are abundant are just not as valuable. We often the cite the shortest, smallest, more unique moments as the best ones: sunsets and rainbows and snow falls, or those moments of uncontrollable laughter, or the agonizingly joyful moments at the top of a rollercoaster. These things are valuable because we cannot experience them whenever we want for however long we want. Their value is derived from their rarity and brevity.

By that logic, I shouldn't grieve for the loss of this snapshot in my life, my first semester in college. I should be glad that it feels so short because if it were eternal, it would also be mundane as breathing and commercials and whatever else is ubiquitous and inconsequential.

I can feel myself shifting from my old point of view, hanging onto to everything and mourning for every small loss, to something new and better. I am grateful for change, for the temporary nature of my existence. Without it, nothing would seem quite so good.